I watched the first episode of “I Hate My Teenage Daughter” earlier tonight; it was kind of an interesting show.

For those who haven’t heard about the show, Annie (played by Jaime Pressly) and Nikki are two mothers of teenaged daughters who were social outcasts in high school, and they’re increasingly worried about their daughters, Sophie and Mackenzie respectively. Also in the picture are their ex-husbands, Matt and Gary respectively.

In this episode, the moms are called to the principal’s office on the morning of the first school dance to find out that their daughters locked a wheelchair-bound boy in the women’s washroom. They decide that the girls need to be punished, but Nikki has no clue what that even means. Annie insists that they need to ground the girls, causing them to miss the dance.

This doesn’t go too well; Sophie and Mackenzie drive Annie and Nikki up the wall. Matt and Gary make an appearance but are totally hopeless too. Eventually Nikki caves, and Annie decides to allow Sophie to attend as well. The moms do figure out how to punish the girls in the end, though.

The characters are kind of interesting. It’s hard to imagine any of them having been parents for 15 years. With the exception of Annie (and Jack, Matt’s brother, whose purpose seems mainly to be to point out the obvious to the defective personalities surrounding him) you probably wouldn’t want to let any of the other characters around your children.  Makes sense; we all know how funny upstanding role models are.

And obviously, as a comedy, it’s not going to shed any new deep meaning on life or anything like that for you.  It is sort of interesting to think about the prevalence of lax parenting and what consequences it has.  In real life, is it really all that bad?  Certainly lax parenting has been on the rise over the past decade or two (and even longer) and one only needs to read the news to find examples of the negative effects of this.  If Sophie and Mackenzie were real-life people, we wouldn’t be surprised to see them in the news for knocking over a liquor store or worse.  But certainly a lot more children are the recipients of lax parenting than are doing things like that.

All in all, not a bad show; I may tune in next time.